Wednesday, October 31, 2012

For the final day of
Haunted Week, we are posting a review of a scary story of our choice.

I’ve decided to review
the scariest book I’ve ever read.

“Can’t
you see?...Bokanovsky’s Process is one of the major instruments of social
stability!”

Major instruments of social stability.

Standard
men and women; in uniform batches… “Ninety-six identical twins working in
ninety-six identical machines!...You really know where you are. For the first
time in history.” He quoted the planetary motto. “Community, Identity,
Stability.”

Huxley’s vision of the
future is, as Neil Postman points out in the introduction to Amusing Ourselves to Death, often
overshadowed by George Orwell’s 1984.
But as Postman points out, we do not appear to be on a path toward
totalitarianism. Many of these regimes around the world have already fallen.
Big Brother is likely easier to see coming than Huxley’s version, Brave New World, in which we
are distracted by entertainment, pacified by mindless slogans, and utterly
seduced by science.

Anyone who spends time
with teenagers today, whether they themselves are a teen or not, can see the
sort of passive indifference to learning that characterizes the denizens of the
Brave New World, a world in which nobody protests when the collective works of
Shakespeare are destroyed. And perhaps even more upsetting, today’s adults are
often infantilized by video games, smartphones, reality TV…

Meanwhile, though, not everyone has given up thinking. Our ability to
manipulate nature through science marches forward. It’s not all that difficult
to imagine that today’s ability to alter genes to select a child’s gender or
screen for genetic defects—or clone living things—will lead us to the ability
Huxley predicts: The Bokanovsky Process, in which people’s destinies are
determined by the state before they are even born. Some are born Alphas or
Betas, and they are individuals, after a fashion, with jobs and a degree of free
will. Some are Deltas or Gammas, who go where they are told, never asking
questions because the ability to think has been taken away from them. Deltas,
for example, are conditioned to dislike flowers. They are conditioned the way I
trained my puppy to behave for cookies.

The architects of the
Brave New World believe that they have perfected mankind, and created a world
of stability and order.

In many ways, this notion
of free will versus well-intentioned control is the theme of all science
fiction. It was echoed in one of my favorite films, Serenity, when Mal decides to stay and fight the Alliance, to take
a stand against a government that tried to use drugs in the air supply to keep
the population calm:

“Sure as I know anything, I know this
- they will try again. Maybe on another world, maybe on this very ground swept
clean. A year from now, ten? They'll swing back to the belief that they can
make people... better. And I do not hold to that.”

That’s the thing—the goal
is always good on paper. But the drug meant to calm the population of Miranda in Serenity led to an army of murderous,
cannibalistic Reavers. In Huxley’s version, they are out for good as well. When
the Savage, who grew up outside the confines of civilization, asks why no one
reads Othello anymore, he is told that it’s because there’s no need for tragedy
anymore.

“Our world is not the same as
Othello's world… you can't make tragedies without social instability. The
world's stable now. People are happy; they get what they want, and they never
want what they can't get.”

I don’t know about anyone else, but I’ll take the tragedy—I’d rather
know what I’m missing.

Tuesday, October 30, 2012

I’m not sure if this is
supposed to be a game, but I’m turning my post into one (Key's at the bottom)

These are five last lines
of famous books….

1

.“He was soon
borne away by the waves and lost in darkness and distance.”

2. "I lingered
round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath
and hare-bells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and
wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in
that quiet earth.”

3. “I took her
hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and as the morning mists had
risen long ago when I first left the forge, so the evening mists were rising
now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they shoed to me, I saw no
shadow of another parting with her.”